Something I think the French Connection and Live in Die in L.A. chases have going for them that a lot of the more recent ones don't is a sense of real palpable danger. The protagonist isn't perfectly avoiding every hazard - they're just barely making it while endangering both themselves and everybody else on the road. Its messy, its desperate, and it many ways its a sign of how obsessed and possibly insane the participants are.

I really liked the Bourne movie car chases for a similar but different reason; they're kinetic. I don't think I've seen as many collisions instigated by the driver in chase scenes, much less situations where the car keeps on going after getting hammered a few times. I don't know how realistic it is that a tiny Euro auto can take that kind of a beating without killing everybody involved, but its almost like they took the intensity of their hand-to-hand fights and applied it to vehicular mayhem.

I don't know if anybody here has seen Dirty Larry and Crazy Mary, but its a '70s chase movie (there were a lot of those, really) which is a bit like Vanishing Point but loopier. Its another case of vehicles with possibly unstable people at the wheels doing amazing/terrible things, and the ending is pretty jaw-dropping.

Oh! And The Driver. Walter Hill movie with Ryan O'Neal as an honest-to-god professional getaway driver and Bruce Dern as the cop trying to catch him. O'Neal's character is kind of a cipher (common trait to Walter Hill heroes, really), but there's a long string of inventive cops-and-robbers chases that are worth seeing. If there was a film that actually featured a character who was as limited as the 2.0 Wheelman, it'd probably this one; dude doesn't do much other than drive.

Just saw the new film The Town directed by Ben Affleck and it is very much a 10KB film set in Boston with an awesome chase scene right smack in the middle of it. It is one of those chase scenes where ingenuity and hitting things to slow up the cops happens but they never hit a fruit stand. Thankfully, Affleck kept that trope out of it.

But everyone needs to see The Town. It is very much 10KB since it takes place in the Charlestown area of Boston where the culture used to be such that a guy could get murdered in broad daylight in the middle of the street but no one would talk to the cops because of a code of silence in the community. For a while, it was the bank robbery capital of the world.

But everyone needs to see The Town. It is very much 10KB since it takes place in the Charlestown area of Boston where the culture used to be such that a guy could get murdered in broad daylight in the middle of the street but no one would talk to the cops because of a code of silence in the community. For a while, it was the bank robbery capital of the world.

If you liked The Town, check out Gone Baby Gone, another good crime flick Ben Affleck directed. That one's about a kidnapping case and a husband-and-wife private investigator team who get tangled up in it.